How Can Google’s G Suite Help my Nonprofit Thrive?

Nov 19, 2019 | Guides

Zoe Allen

by Zoe Allen

Find out how to use Google’s free G Suite for Nonprofits to become more efficient and maximise your impact.

Google Suite for Nonprofit

Personalised emails, great collaboration software, secure communications – all for free.

What is G Suite?

G Suite is Google’s collection of business apps like Gmail, Google Docs and Google Drive. Nonprofits can access the G Suite Basic collection without any charge.

Google’s apps are integrated and work together to allow you to collaborate both across the apps and between members of your nonprofit, wherever they are in the world. G Suite focuses on being simple and easy to use, so that you can focus on your cause in the most efficient way possible.

Have a look out how other nonprofits have used G suite to help their nonprofit thrive here.

Laptop Teamwork Nonprofit

What are the benefits?

Improved efficiency

By keeping all your tools in one place, and integrating between apps, your nonprofit will become more streamlined and efficient. As you can all work on projects at once with Google Docs, and easily share information through the various apps, it will become easier than ever to work efficiently as a team. There’s no longer any need for long email threads swapping documents back and forth or trying to work out when your whole team is free!

Becoming more professional

Using G Suite to create stylish documents and using a personalised email address will help your nonprofit seem professional, legitimate and dedicated. Of course, using G Suite to become more organised and efficient will also help this image.

Communicate with all your groups

The G Suite’s different platforms are great for communicating with a range of people. Use group chats just for staff with Hangouts, but communicate with your whole volunteer base with Currents. G Suite is great for adapting to different sizes of groups.

Working together, wherever you are

The G Suite can be used by your team all over the globe, in permanent offices and when travelling around. It makes it much easier to connect and work together no matter the situation, as the G Suite can all be used on smart phones too. You can even work together on the same document at the same time, making working together fast and efficient as well as easy.

Stay organised

Many of the G Suite apps, like Calendar and Keep, are designed to help you stay as organised as possible. And with integration between apps, as well as reminders, G Suite does the work for you. 

Keep information and files secure

Between Google’s Drive and the easy-to-use admin options available for the G Suite, you can have complete control over your nonprofit’s files and information, and keep them private and secure. With everything in one place, you won’t need to worry about losing files, either. 

Increasing your donations

Every effort that goes into making your nonprofit run smoothly and appear more professional and legitimate is going to improve your attractiveness to donors, too. And with your business more efficient and organised, you have more time to focus on what really matters – fundraising for your cause. Your professionalism and efficiency will also impress any key donors who are involved in your nonprofit, encouraging their support.

G Suite will also help you make better materials and documents as a team, which will translate to more effective advertising for your cause, and hopefully therefore more donations. 

Google Nonprofits Collaborate

How can I access G Suite for free?

If you’re an eligible nonprofit institution, it’s really easy. To access G Suite for Nonprofits, you need to make a Google for Nonprofits account. To do this you must be registered as a charitable organisation in your country, and be verified by TechSoup (Charity Digital in the UK). Just note there are eligibility requirements so if you are a governmental, healthcare, or academic institution, you won’t qualify.

Once you’ve applied for an account and been verified, you can simply activate the Suite. All absolutely free.

You can read more about eligibility for Google for Nonprofits in one of our other posts.

Google Nonprofits

G Suite Apps and Features

Gmail

Gmail is Google’s popular mail app. It provides private and secure professional email software for your nonprofit and its very easy to use. 

You don’t have to have a Gmail address, either. You can have a professional custom email with your domain name, in the form name@yournonprofit.com to make your nonprofit seem legitimate and professional. You can also make group email addresses for the public to contact, such as volunteer@yournonprofit.com, that your whole team can access.

Google also makes it easy to transfer across your old emails and contacts with its migration tools. It’s even integrated with other G Suite apps, so you can easily move from communicating by email, to instant messaging, to a video call on Meet.

Google Calendar

Google Calendars are great online calendars that integrate with your email and contacts to make everything as easy as possible. What’s more, calendars are shareable so that you can easily see when coworkers are free for meetings. You can choose to show exactly where you are, or just when you are free or busy. Reminders make sure you can focus on your cause without missing an event. 

Google Calendar is designed to make it as easy as possible to plan your day, especially if you work in a team.

Currents: Share and Connect Widely

Probably a less familiar app than Gmail and Google Calendars, Currents works like a private social media platform for your business. It allows you to share, connect and engage with branches of your nonprofit across the globe. You can make your discussion more private and direct, or appeal to a wider audience to share information and crowdsource ideas.

Hangouts: Instant Messaging and Video Calls

‘Hangouts’ is split into Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. Hangouts Chat is an instant messaging platform for private and group messages designed to make it simple to communicate quickly within a team. It’s integrated with all the apps in G Suite and can add meetings discussed in the chat to your calendar or work out a time you are all free, upload items to Google Drive, or collaborate on Google Docs or Sheets.

Hangouts Meet is an easy-to-use video calling platform that makes it easy to host face to face meetings wherever you are. Meet is as easy as can be, with no accounts or plug-ins – simply share a link to immediately access a meeting.

Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms

Google’s cloud-stored document apps are a great way to work as a team on projects, or easily share your documents with others. Google Docs is for word processing, Google Sheets is for creating spreadsheets, Slides allows you to collaborate on slide shows, and Forms allows you to easily create interactive surveys and forms. Best of all, you don’t have to share back and forth to collaborate on documents – you can all work on them at the same time. 

All the apps have chatrooms to allow you to easily discuss your project and are compatible with common file formats once downloaded. 

G Suite Team Meeting

Google Sites and App Maker

The G Suite includes a basic web page builder. Google Sites allows you to create a one-page site for your nonprofit, but it is not suited to complex websites or larger organisations and is unlikely to meet the website requirements for the ad grants.

Similarly, App Maker uses a simple interface to help you design apps for your nonprofit to make day-to-day running easier. It might need a little more knowledge than Sites, but does include templates to make it easier for anyone to learn to leverage this tool.

Keep: Notes and To-do Lists

Google Keep allows you to store notes, to-do list, images, and whatever else you may need all in one place. You can collaborate on notes with your team, and then view your ideas on any device while you work. It’s a simple, fun and visual way to make sure you don’t forget anything important.

Jamboard: Interactive, Collaborative Whiteboard

This is another app that is probably unfamiliar. Jamboard allows your team to collaborate on an interactive online whiteboard to brainstorm projects and solutions. It’s visual and creative, allowing you to crop images and notes as well as write and draw. It can be used both in person or during online meetings, making working together across the world easier than ever. 

Google Drive: Cloud Storage

Google Drive makes it easy to store all your team files in one place, provide access to only who needs to see it and keep everything safe and secure. With Basic G Suite for Nonprofits, you’ll get 30GB of storage per user (which is all you’ll need). 

Google Cloud Search

With Google Cloud Search, you can search across all your company’s information stored on Google services, from spreadsheets to emails, to sites, to calendar events.

Secure, Controlled Access

Google makes it easy to administrate your nonprofits use of Google platforms. You can learn more about how it makes Admin controls simple here.

Google also offers easy control over data with Vault, helps you manage your nonprofit’s mobile devices, and provides you with insight into how the G Suite is being used.

Google Suite on laptop

What’s next?

As we’ve shown, accessing the G Suite for Nonprofits could be a great step in getting your nonprofit’s online presence up to scratch and increasing your donations. However, it is only one small part of managing your nonprofit’s online presence.

Twenti wants to help nonprofits reach their potential online. We offer bespoke website design, digital marketing, and analytics to track and improve your performance. We also help nonprofits access Google’s Ads Grant – $10,000 of in-kind advertising with Google every month – by helping them meet the eligibility requirements by managing ad campaigns and providing professional and user-friendly websites.

To find out more, book a free consultation with our experts and explore your options to reach thousands more donors online.

Upgrade your nonprofit’s online presence and explore new donor opportunities. 

Related Articles

Top 10 Environmental Nonprofits

Top 10 Environmental Nonprofits

Read how these 10 environmental nonprofits are working in unique ways to combat the problems our planet is facing, and how you can help.

£8,000/month of free ad credit?

We help nonprofits increase online donations.
Get In Touch

Twenti Ltd
Kemp House
152-160 City Road
London
EC1V 2NX

020 3998 3990
team@twenti.com

We help nonprofits increase online donations.
Share This

Would someone you know like this?

Share it with them!